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Wednesday, October 9, 2013

Demoing and Selling Cloud Based Solutions

A few thoughts today on how you can showcase Cloud based solutions in demos to customers.
Firstly I was reading about Why Salesforce is Winning the Cloud Platform War and it made me think about Cloud Platforms in general. Solutions are running either on some proprietary platform, one of the leading platforms (like Salesforce - force.com) or else some hybrid using rackspace.com or other providers of hosting space.

The main advantage to the enterprise is of integration. Being able to buy one cloud based product and integrate it internally or with other solutions you buy.
This is also one area of weakness or concern many customers have shown.
Another big advantage is security. If you can ride on an existing secure model and not have to put a lot of effort into building (and proving) a new security model then you can put more effort directly into your solution.
Most of these things only really affect the way you would answer RFPs or questions from customers on your solution.

To sell a good Cloud solution to your customer, you still need to meet the key needs - which should be whatever your product is meant to do in the first place.
Secondly if you are selling a cloud deployment model, then that needs to make your solution more relevant to the customer, rather than being a limitation.

If you think of those two points, then you should make your presentation focus on those pieces - what does it do, why is this relevant for this customer, and why should having it available as a cloud solution be morebeneficial.